Monthly Archive for September, 2006

Site Design

Published
by
Cineris
on September 7, 2006
in Technology and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

If you read the site semi-regularly you’ve probably noticed I’ve been switching themes a lot lately. On the whole I’m getting a little irritated with the site design. I began using Terracotta — It’s a nice design, but the colors are pretty strong and I prefer something a little less eye-catching on its own. I also wanted an easy trackback link on every post since I’ve been finding that I really get discouraged if I want to trackback from someone else’s post and such a link is not provided.

I moved to K2 after seeing a nice demonstration of it in action over at God of the Machine. Well, K2 unfortunately never worked out very well for me: The sidebar modules that come included with it, which were the primary reason I switched, would not work. Furthermore, I noticed that categories were not browseable in that theme. The categories issue is probably easily solved by adding the correct sidebar module, but sidebar modules were not working.

I then moved to the default Wordpress theme. Simple, no frills, but functional, right? Well, I thought so too until I noticed that my images were extending from the main content area into the sidebar. I definitely need a content area with over 560 pixels, and I’d probably prefer 640 (though that may be a bit wide for easy reading, but then text can be padded on the sides).

For the time being I’m back to Terracotta. Hopefully soon I’ll have some more time to customize a theme.

Final Fantasy XII: First Reports

Published
by
Cineris
on September 4, 2006
in Games and RPGs
. 0 Comments

Unfortunately, I don’t yet have my hands on Final Fantasy 12. However, I’m reposting the thoughts of some people on one of my favorite anime boards about the game.

I haven’t really been following the game at all, since aside from a few hours in Guild Wars or Unreal Tournament each week I don’t really have time for many games. Still, I’ve loved just about every game in the series except 8 (which was just too horrible to finish) and 9 (which I couldn’t get into), and so I’m certain to pick this one up eventually:

Here’s the first impressions of “Yota”:

Alright, my brother just so happened to have imported the twelfth game in the opulent Final Fantasy series, and it was my distinct pleasure to have the first run through the game.

What caught me by surprise at first was the opening. Full CGI, with the beautiful Prelude piano playing in the background. Just a simple selection of “New Game” and “Load Game” not too obvious located, lest it distract one from the gorgeous visuals.

You’ve heard or read of the new fighting system, so I won’t go into too much details. No more transitions from adventure to battle screen, and no victory music after the conclusion of said battle (although it still plays it after a boss fight). Characters are no longer limited to a certain weapon archetype, so the main character, who typically wields a long sword and shield, can also wield a crossbow, magic rod, or even a two-handed mace.

I’m about 30+ hours into the game, although this is a bit misleading since most of it is spent farming for money. Yes, I said farming, since certain monsters drop valuable loot and respawn (although in limited numbers). Almost every action except traversing on foot and basic fighting needs to be bought, from weapons and items to even special moves and magic spells.

That axe look appealling on your character? Well, assuming you have the money, your character will still be unable to use it unless he has a license for it. Licenses are bought using license points, which you earn through defeating monsters (thankfully enough). All the skills you need, as well as general stat buffs (such as 10% less energy spent on magic), magic spells, and weapon and armor proficiencies need to be bought through licenses.

Another interesting twist to the battle sequences is something called “Gambit.” This is basically the AI of the members of your party you do not have direct control over (this includes guest characters that occasionally join your party). You can actually, in a very simple manner, program your partymates how you want them to act in a battle situation. For example, you can tell a healer to cast a cure spell on an ally whenever his HP goes below 50% of his max. Another is when “blind” is cast on an ally, either use an item or cast the appropriate spell to cure the blindness. I even have a setup where I have an ally attack another ally who is under the effects of “sleep”.

And for the last bit, the story. For those of you who have played Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, FFXII is set in the same universe. Even with 30+ hours invested, it seems there’s still quite a bit to explore, and I don’t think I’ve even explored a tenth of what this game offers. I’m surprised they even fit all this content on a single disc (seeing as Xenosaga III took up two discs), and I’m excited to see what else there is. The story itself isn’t so much romance, since the main character already has a girlfriend at the beginning of the game. The story is more focused on personal ambitions and vendettas toward the beginning, and becomes much broader as it goes along.

More below the cut… Continue reading ‘Final Fantasy XII: First Reports’

Tyrian Travels: Ascalon Adventures, part 5

Published
by
Cineris
on September 4, 2006
in Games and Guild Wars
. 0 Comments

Part 5 in my indefinitely-long series to attain the Grandmaster Cartographer title in Guild Wars.

It’s looking like I’m nearing the end of the “Ascalon Adventures” subseries here. I’ve got about two major areas left on my list: Dragon’s Gullet and Ascalon Foothills. Prior to beginning this series I already did fairly extensive runs of Pockmark Flats, Regent Valley, and Old Ascalon. I may do a single post that wraps up those three areas because I’m betting I will only uncover about .03% for each of those areas. There’s also The Breach and the Flame Temple Corridor transitional areas that I willl probably cover in the same post, as they’re very small and I’m also unlikely to uncover anything substantial there.

This post covers the Diessa Lowlands. Unfortunately this post is going to be a little more disjointed than usual as I found it extremely difficult to manage this area — The area, particularly in the western end, has a large number of Shatter Gargoyles. As I mentioned in my post on the Nolani Academy Mission, you can’t run past these foes, so I was forced to fight any that I encountered. This is particularly tedious when your character is set up for speed rather than killing power, as you end up having to whittle down enemies with your regular attacks. Add on the fact that this area contains Resurrect Gargoyles that will resurrect any nearby other gargoyles (including Resurrect Gargoyles) and it gets very tedious. I ended up dying and restarting at least once, and I took a break halfway through when a friend joined the game.

GW500

Above is the map before beginning my run. The red areas are fogged areas that I planned to investigate. The first patch of fog I uncovered was near the bottom-most red problem-area. This is a direct run from Nolani Academy, so it was pretty easy to get there.

GW501

The little hook area where I’m located in the screenshot above is actually a dead end, so I doubled back and headed to the western-most problem area. As I mentioned above, the western area of this zone is crawling with Shatter Gargoyles. I explored the area I wanted to investigate, and I believe I uncovered a lone patch of fog there but didn’t continue further north — Too many Gargoyles made it look like an unrewarding effort considering the map seems largely uncovered.

Below is a picture I took upon spotting the Nolani Historical Monument near that area.

GW502

Once I uncovered the westernmost area I continued along to hit the Southern trouble-spot. This was a huge find. If you look at the map in the screenshot below you will find that not only did I explore the circled red problem spot, but that I continued beyond that area into an entirely new fogged area.

GW503

Above you can see me looking out onto a large Charr encampment made in the ruins of some ancient temple. You can see the crumbling pillars and an earthen pyramid or ziggurat to either side.

Below I have followed the mountain pass that leads into this area to its full extent, and am overlooking the main Charr encampment. There are about three bosses wandering around on the structure below me.

GW504

This next picture shows me after a short dash through the area, past all the Charr and looking back onto one of the Ziggurats. Later on I would return with a friend to this area and we would completely eliminate it of Charr and explore every nook and cranny — It was obviously suicidal to attempt to run into such a huge mass of enemies to try and explore the edges of the ruined temple where the Charr were encamped, so I mainly ran around the edges of the nearby areas.

GW505

Two pictures above you can see two signal fires burning in the distance. This next picture comes after I have followed the path lit by the signal fires. This path led back into territory that I had already explored, but other people may not have. You can see a small abandoned settlement in the area where the screenshot below is taken, with a few makeshift houses on a cliff accessible only by this bridge.

GW506

I followed this southern path to its extent and ended up at the border of the zone. At this point my friend arrived and we returned to Grendich Courthouse to fully explore that lower Charr-infested area and to take a look at the other problem areas I noted.

GW507

An obligatory beauty-shot. If you look at the map you can see this is after I explored the northernmost problem area. I believe I uncovered a single spot (.03%) of fog there, but nothing more.

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Here I am near the westernmost problem area. Unfortunately this area was not fogged at all, the blurriness in the map was just the natural zone border.

GW509

Total gain for this outing… Approximately .2%. Not bad, but troublesome. I have a feeling that my efforts at running through zones are going to become even more difficult once I move on from Ascalon, and that’s a rather frightening thought overall.

RPG Tools: Crests

Published
by
Cineris
on September 3, 2006
in Guild Wars, Personal and RPGs
. 0 Comments

Although I’m not currently running a game in my campaign setting, I’m always on the lookout for useful materials that I will be able to put to use in the future. One of the major elements that I want to emphasize with this setting is the political relationships of various factions. When I was running the campaign the players found themselves caught up in events and they were offered assistance by two major players in that area, both who were vying for power over the other. They sided with one of the factions that these men represented, which created friction for them when they encountered people aligned with the other faction.

Crest3

Ideally I wanted to introduce even more factions, but I didn’t want to overload the other guys in the group — It’s difficult to keep all of the characters in the immediate plot, much less the larger metaplot, straight from week to week. What I really needed was some serious aids to help them along. I had started drawing some crests when the game was ongoing but usually that endeavor was cut out during prep triage. With the virtually infinite amount of preparation one can do for a game, spending a few hours drawing sketches of crests just didn’t rank up there high enough most of the time. I could have done some very hasty sketches, but once I begin a task my perfectionist streak will usually insist that I follow through to the best of my abilities.

Crest2

The thought just hit me sometime last week — Guild Wars has a variety of crest designs available to guilds in the game as ways of representing their faction — Why not use Guild Wars’ iconography? It seemed like a good idea, so today I went and downloaded all of the crests available via the Guild Wars website. I ran them through a simple desaturation and contrast action in PhotoShop and then created vectorized versions of each crest by using Illustrator’s livetrace functionality, in case I ever need to scale the images up. Though I don’t think I’ll use all of the images there is certainly a large percentage of usable crests overall. If you’re any good with Photoshop you can likely take bits and pieces from the existing crests to create new ones as well.

Crest1

I figured that other people might be interested in these as well for their own games. Here’s the original images, as well as the desaturated-contrasted versions I made:

Download Link.

If there’s any desire for the vectorized versions I can make those available, but considering those are about 20 MB I’m not going to upload them if there’s no desire for them (not to mention you can always vectorize as necessary on your own).

Filthy Lucre

Published
by
Cineris
on September 1, 2006
in Games, Guild Wars and RPGs
. 1 Comment

From the Guild Wars news page:

Guild Wars players now have the opportunity to purchase PVP Unlock Packs for all Prophecies skills! For $9.99 USD (€8.99, £5.99), you can unlock all of the 70+ Prophecies skills for a single profession. For $39.99 USD (€35.99, £23.99) you can unlock all 450+ Prophecies skills for the 6 professions. Once unlocked, skills can be used by any of your PvP characters. Head to the Guild Wars Official Store to take advantage of this much-requested opportunity.

Unbelievable. It’s not like it’s even difficult to unlock the great majority of skills in Guild Wars, but some people can’t even be bothered to play the game to unlock them. They merely want to jump right in to PvP as though PvE doesn’t even exist. It’s too bad ArenaNet is promoting this sort of behavior. If we’re going to condone an attitude that PvP players should be able to entirely skip PvE, then let’s continue that thinking and make the PvE game better and distinct from PvP. There’s plenty of unique things that are fine in a PvE environment that don’t belong in PvP.

As horrible as I find this news, it pales in comparison with what some other cretins have thought up. Remember Real Money Trading? Well, some people have decided that Real Money Trading isn’t something that needs to be stopped — They’ve decided they want in on it. Say goodbye to games, via 1UP:

Microsoft mentioned a new kind of microtransaction at the session, as well, which they are calling “consumables.” These purchases would be re-purchasable items i.e. if a game was selling 100 gold pieces, you would be able to rebuy 100 gold pieces when you needed them. The “consumables” tech will be included in this fall’s release of the SDK.

Another thing Microsoft intends to add to the Marketplace is the ability for vendors placed in videogames to allow gamers to buy from the Marketplace. Say, there is a vendor in an RPG selling a rare sword and that sword is available on the Marketplace, players will be able to put the sword in a checkout cart and then return to the Marketplace later to complete the download. For now, the in-game Marketplace will bring the Marketplace experience into the gameplay, but the transactions, for now, will still need to be completed on the Marketplace and not in-game.

All I can say is that I look forward to the early demise of games and companies that try to bleed me for every cent I’m worth with pay-for-play “microcontent.”